Why is Product Development Important

Do you know that over the first fiscal quarter of 2018, Apple accelerated investments in research and development operations spending more than $3.4 billion on new hires and initiatives which will keep the company competitive in a fast-paced tech market? This shows the need for new product development to survive in this competitive technology sector.

The success of product development process typically requires considerable resources that leverage the opportunity for better results in a customer’s business. Product development is the life-blood of companies and societies and is often referred to as “The Stage-Gate” where teams collaborate together to perform or develop new innovations.

Product development services benefit the customer & company in the following ways:-

Value for customers

The very first and foremost reason for any new product development is to provide value to the customers. Without this, there is no reason to trait your money for new devices. However, if the product or service offers great value, then the customers feel interested in trying it. The increasing demands of customers for innovation & new technologies keep the companies growing.

Society betterment

There are many instances where new products helped in society improvement beyond any level. The new features or technology has been proved to be a boon for society. Also with the need for new product development practice, companies hire new resources which help the society in terms of employment and income generation.

Importance of Product Development

Growth of the Company

New services or products are the lifelines of any company. The new products and services are created by all size companies for the growth and improvement of their business. New products help in company sustainability by offering new value to its customers which generates additional revenues. Many of the new products are at an incremental improvement stage for past many years, with some new features incorporated in it.

Features of New Product Development

Many Software Development Company around the globe offers many features & characteristics in the new product that describes the appearance, components, and capabilities of your services/product. The product development feature is the slice of business functionality that has corresponding benefits for the end user. The product features must be effectively prioritized in order to offer maximum value.

Here are 4 tips to make your product’s features prioritized, more efficient, meaningful and enjoyable:-

Firstly, you must establish the goal and approach for your business and set the features that you will add. At an initial stage, the product team must agree on strategies, and then align the requirements accordingly.
Secondly, product managers must make a tough decision and lead with conviction. If you do not act as per the timeline to resolve these problems and try to delay your work, then all your efforts & planning will go into vain.
Resist the urge to write long requirements of customers business, instead capture the features that are related to business requirements.
Lastly, you must quantify the value of features against the metrics that matter to your business. Use simple efforts to rank the features of your business project to maximize the return outcomes.

[You May Also Like To Read: PHILOSOPHYHPHY OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT]

How Can We Benefit From Product Development Process?

Product development is the strategy for the successful development of new products or adding new features in the existing product. It is the first step in the development of the product. In business terms, the product development strategy can provide a framework that helps to improve the performance as well as the quality of the products. These strategies can bring up scores of benefits to help you to expand your business in today’s competitive market such as:-

Control over product

Development of a product without a proper strategy is quite a risky challenge. To control and to be sure of your success, you must plan the development of your products or services and this is what your business requires. This planning could help in achieving your business goals.

Improved performance

Many times, even after spending thousands of dollars on promotion or marketing your product, a business owner faces disappointment because of poor quality of the product. Hence, you must look at your production and other processing to keep a record of your wrongdoings & rectify the same.

Benefits of Product Development

Reduce cost

There is no denying the fact that creating and implementing new product leads to the additional huge cost to the company. You may have to bear a huge cost in the initial stage of product development but after the execution process, you will notice the decrease in your product development cost.

How can you speed up Product Development?

The success of the company depends upon how well you keep your words with your customers. This is the reason that launching a product on time is one of the most crucial challenges for them. There are a number of obstacles that may crop up with the product development process, some of them are expected and some of them are unexpected. These hurdles can lead to slowing down the development.

Given below are the some of the steps which are followed that will help you to speed up the product development process without compromising the quality:-

Well-defined product development strategy

To plan a product, the first crucial step is having a product development strategy. The strategy of product development can be defined only when the customer knows about the purpose of having an application around. Before you kick-start your product development, create a rough roadmap that will detail all the necessary steps from product iteration to product launch.

There are 3 main tactics which can be applied to the product development strategy:-

Identifying the market- before we release any product in the market, it is crucial to have research on that product and checks whether it will be accepted by the users or not. For this, you can do surveys, or hunt the community forms or social media channels, etc.
Fixing a time-frame- Deciding the timeframe for the release of the product is another important factor. This will help to allocate the project to different team members, deciding upon the different iterations to complete the project.
Determine the key approaches- It is quite important to have certain key approaches to deal with the challenges that come across with product planning and launch. Some of the key approaches related to it are Wireframes or prototypes, product specification requirements, testing strategy, hiring a development team, etc.

Using the Agile methodology

The team of project management peruses on the methodology and chooses the one which suits best for their projects. Agile methodology is one of the most important among all. It breaks down the project into several iterations of equal duration and then spreads across the time period of 2 to 8 weeks.

Speed up Process of Product Development

Periodic automated testing

It is imperative for testing the software that can be conducted at regular intervals for developments cycles to go smoothly as it is planned. Each time, a new product is added or removed; testing has to be done so that the product must work well on all the supporting platforms.

Right software development technologies

There are lots of software development technologies in the market. They come up with their own stories either positive or negative. You must also consider keeping tabs on latest industry trends while making technology choices for your product development.

Documentation

Documentation describes the architecture and functionality of the product which is under development. It is intended with everyone who is involved with software development project i.e. designer, developer, tester, marketer, etc.

Removing unused code

It is very important to remove the unused code because they can result in a number of issues. Maintaining any code is a burden because customer really has to go through each of the problems and unused codes are there in codebase, they can create lots of confusion.

Requirements of Successful Product Development

To develop a successful new product is not an easy game. One has to make lots of decision and exercise to minimize the rate of failure. There are a large number of factors that result in failure of product development such as, shortage of new ideas, long time period, high cost developing, fragmented or small market, etc.

But to succeed with a new product, one need to follow a decorum or a system step by step which results in success of product development. Based on the possible causes of new product failures, there are some essentials factors which also need to be considered in developing new product:-

Adequate market demand
Market trends and economic conditions
Compatibility with the present production and marketing structure
Availability of funds
Competitiveness
Managerial experience and ability
Suitability with objective, image, and goodwill of a company
The time period, or gestation period
Legal and social aspects
Internal integration and cooperation

All these factors lead to a decrease in the chances of failure of new product development and hence results in the successful development of the product.

Conclusion

In this competitive market, a business must constantly adapt the new marketing strategies to stay ahead in the competition. The understanding of product lifecycle and extension strategies results in the growth of your business. Hence, there should be a response to the customers changing needs.

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